How ‘Good Business’ became good for business
“For the past 50 years, shareholder profit has been the overriding factor in the way businesses work, think and hire. But, with today’s consumer responsibility replacing yesterday’s consumerism, businesses are increasingly looking to be ‘good citizens’ and reflect the culture and issues that matter most to their customers and employees alike.”
In November 2019, as part of the Sixley Sessions, Paul Naha-Biswas led a panel asking those at the heart of the values-based revolution how delivering on good business — despite the associated costs — became good for business.
The panelists were:
Keith Underwood, COO of Channel 4
Sarah Kendall, Managing Partner at Fuse, Omnicom’s partnerships and experience agency
David Jones, Head of Leadership, Learning, Talent & Culture at Barclays
For those who could not make it on the day a brief summary has been compiled below.
Summary
The ‘Good Business’ revolution is in full swing and is, in the UK at least, centred around values important to both consumer and employee groups. But how did we get here?
The key themes from our panel discussion were:
The focus on values and ethics in society is putting pressure on Business
Choosing your values is a journey for both Executive and staff
Leadership must commit to delivery
Values can win, or lose, talent
Leaders need to lead on and embed values — this includes the Boardroom and branch managers alike
A focus on values and ethics in society is putting pressure on Business
Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), there has been a greater scrutiny of personal, Governmental and corporate behaviour in areas such as inclusion, the environment and ethics. This has been amplified by social media and review sites that have enabled consumers to have their voices heard and to campaign (sometimes from their armchair) on issues they feel important to them.
Sarah Kendell, Managing Partner of Fuse, highlighted the dangers to companies, “if companies don’t focus on living up to their own brand values, a small consumer voice on social media can quickly snowball into something with real and negative brand impact”.
Channel 4, a broadcaster tasked with being disruptive and generating change, is seeing brands start to proactively reflect today’s values. “Brands actively want to be associated with diversity and inclusion, but there is still significant progress to be made” said Keith Underwood, COO of Channel 4. “LGBT+ and disabled people are still greatly underrepresented in comparison to the population. For example, while over 20% of the UK population has some form of disability, just 2% of ads feature members of the disabled community. Furthermore, those from minority groups play a lead role in significantly less than half of the adverts within which they feature”.
Post-GFC, Barclays had to redefine its values or face a loss of customer and regulator confidence. Once famous for its Tony Scott-directed, Anthony Hopkins-led ‘Big Bank’ ads of the early 2000s, Barclays has done a 360° shift in positioning to return to the community-led values of its origin. David Jones, Head of Leadership, Learning, Talent & Culture at Barclays, said that “after the GFC, Bob Diamond and the Libor scandal, we needed to visibly reset both our culture and people’s views of Barclays”. He added that, while difficult, change was not daunting for a business that has been successfully evolving for most of its 329-year history.
Choosing your values is a journey
The first step on the journey is for companies to choose values that engage and resonate with their culture and goals. Sarah Kendall recommended that firms look to their origins for help.
“Companies weren’t started with someone saying ‘let’s make loads of money!’. There’s always a reason or story behind every firm and this should guide your values”. Sarah Kendall
David Jones agreed with this approach and said that corporations need to be driven by their moral compass. This led Barclays to the values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, and Stewardship. However, the meanings are more important the specific words.
“We probably started by spending too long obsessing over the words and not enough time considering what they really meant”. David Jones
Paul Naha-Biswas from Sixley asked what happens when a company gets value-promotion wrong. He pointed to Pepsi’s faux-protest advertisement featuring supermodel, Kendall Jenner. Released in 2017 around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests, the advert was strongly criticised by its target audience. When asked about this, Sarah Kendall said that the key takeaway for brands was the way Pepsi moved quickly to remedy and to ensure that this would not happen again. This included pulling the ad, apologising, bring in external creative agencies and tightening up messaging checks firmwide.
Keith Underwood addresses the impressive work Sky has done.
When asked about other brands’ successes, the panel was unanimous in their praise of Patagonia. Keith Underwood also pointed to Sky’s impressive diversity and values work within a working environment once known for its aggressiveness and machoism.
How do you deliver on values?
Delivery starts at the top. “At Barclays, our CEO often says he is convicted, not just committed, to the values” said David Jones. Having the CEO as champion enabled Barclays to get rid of the ‘us and them’ mentality and bring together the Community Bank and the Investment Bank to establish what values they universally share. “At the beginning, the Investment Bank staff couldn’t understand what values had to do with profit while the Community Bank felt we were patronising them by talking about values that they felt they’ve been living for the last 300 years”.
Barclays LifeSkills shows how as a brand it is possible to engage with values in a positive way.
Channel 4 has been investing to make Channel 4 reflect regional UK and not just the London media set. To deliver its Nations & Regions strategy, Channel 4 has aligned its senior staff’s goals to success and this means hard incentives. “Aligning the KPI’s in the bonus structure for senior staff with our values helps to drive execution” said Keith Underwood.
Values can win, or lose, talent
In the war for Millennial and Generation Z talent, the right values are key.
“56% of new graduates won’t consider working for a company without clearly defined values. They have to be ingrained in the culture of the business”. David Jones
Sarah Kendall added, “A talented potential hire wouldn’t work for one of our brands on the basis of their personal values. It’s made us far more conscious of who we work with and the motivations behind that work”.
“You now ask, ‘do you have any questions for me?’ and get bombarded. They [new hires] now interview you and the company you represent” said Channel 4’s Keith Underwood. “Within the media industry, competition from new, global tech players makes it harder to attract and retain talent. As such, incumbents need to be inclusive to the widest range of talent and to convey a clear values-driven proposition to the market”.
The view from the Boardroom
Incorporating values into the way you operate day-to-day is just as important as externally promoting your values. Keith Underwood from Channel 4 said, “When we’ve run a campaign to promote our values, we’ve had mixed results. People don’t necessarily care about Channel 4 talking about its values, they’re more interested in the outputs that those values produce; innovative content that stimulates debate, inspires change, and represents alternative points of view”.
With 80,000 staff and a national network of branches, David Jones iterated the difficulty Barclays faced when trying to implement values from the top down. “With 14 ranks between a bank clerk in Merthyr Tydfil and our CEO in Canary Wharf, it was important that values resonate top-to-bottom so that local champions emerge to inspire local staff”.
There is always a need to drive profit and financial targets. But as a firm established by the Government to serve a public remit, Channel 4 sees delivering on its values-driven remit as its primary focus with profit a secondary concern. “As a publicly owned not-for-profit, we have to make sure the independent regulator can see us executing against our values-driven remit. Otherwise, we are just a £2–3 billion publicly-owned asset that could be sold off”, Keith Underwood said.
